Following the waves of euphoria and criticism surrounding
the topic of the New Self-Employment during the "Roaring
Nineties," the onset of the current economic crisis
caused the discourse to slowly slip downhill into a
mood of resigned depression.

The 1990s were an ambivalent time for artists: while
opportunities to earn a living in the traditional art
market were meager, a massive creativity hype was simultaneously
overrunning the business world. This boom brought with
it a host of new opportunities to make good in the exploding
design and Internet fields. But it also rapidly established
a freelance lifestyle as the general model for all those
partaking in the working world of the "New Economy"
– a way of life that had formerly distinguished artists
from conventional employees. This model entailed self-employment
and self-reliance, irregular working hours and hence
income, a blurring of the boundaries between work and
leisure time, the increasing encroachment of creative
elements in a variety of jobs, and project-orientation.

It's true that the rise of what had to be considered
– in comparison to what are typically viewed as normal
working conditions à la Fordism – as an "atypical"
work style was not a completely new development. But
the fact that this more flexible model was no longer
reserved for women and migrants in the secondary services
sector, but was increasingly spreading to the traditional
business world dominated by the university-educated
domestic male, turned this phenomenon into a pressing
theme for a host of journalists and writers.

The new self-employment developed its most palpable dynamics
in segments involved in creativity and communications,
where participation in wide-ranging discourses on one's
own identity and role are a loosely defined part of
every job. This might explain why such a remarkable
body of literature arose dealing with the new working
conditions engendered by the New Economy.

The literature treating the phenomenon of the "new
self-employed" can be divided into four categories,
each of which came to a head at a different phase in
the discourse. It all began with the euphoric ideologues,
who were soon confronted with skeptics. These were in
turn followed by those who gave the phenomenon a more
carefully considered critical appraisal. For the time
being we now find ourselves in a fourth phase, in which
the literature of depression echoes the current economic
downturn. But let's start back at the beginning.

Euphoric Ideology

In Germany in 1997 the "Commission for Future Questions
of the Free States of Bavaria and Saxony" (*Kommission
für Zukunftsfragen der Freistaaten Bayern und Sachsen*),
of which sociologist Ulrich Beck was a member, proclaimed
its controversial vision for a solution to Germany's
unemployment problems: the model of the typical employee
should henceforward be expunged from the collective
consciousness. Replacing this outdated model in the
future labor market was instead "each person as
entrepreneur of his own working capacity and subsistence."
Accompanied by euphoric rhetoric, this vision conjured
up the image of a self-sufficient, self-reliant individual,
to be born of the radical withdrawal of the state from
shaping the social and regulatory framework for private
business. With the new form of business proposed as
part of the Hartz Commission's plan to reform the labor
market, known as "Me, Inc." (*Ich AG*),
this vision rapidly came close to becoming reality in
Germany.

Similar sounds were coming in the 1990s from the homeland
of the New Economy on the other side of the Atlantic.
The climax of this euphoric moment was reached with
Daniel Pink's *Free Agent Nation: How America's New
Independent Workers Are Transforming the Way We Live*
(2001). Pink paints a picture of a nation of freelancers
whose flight from corporate servitude is connected with
self-fulfillment, freedom and maximizing their income.

Skepticism

It's not exactly difficult to poke holes in this fantasy.
Critical analyses of what everyday life as a freelancer
is really like refute these optimistic reveries with
hard empirical evidence, unmasking them as mere ideology.
One look at present-day social conditions is usually
enough to cause one to dismiss the promises made in
the euphoric literature as so much hot air. The central
studies on the topic that have been conducted in Austria
come from the trade-union milieu: Eva Angerler / Claudia
Kral-Bast *Typische Atypische* (1998), *Fiftitu% (A)typisch
Frau – zwischen allen Stühlen* (2002), Gerhard Gstöttner-Hofer
et al.: *Was ist morgen noch normal* (1997), Kurswechsel
2/2000 *Leitbild Unternehmer*, and Emmerich Talos *Atypische
Beschäftigung* (1999).

Their conclusions: most freelancers did not voluntarily
seek that status; most are dependent on a few major
contractors; their economic situation is more precarious
than self-determined; the variety of activities in which
they are forced to get involved (from their actual chosen
work, to bookkeeping, to manual services) leads to constant
overtaxing of time and capacities; working at home leads
working hours to expand into endlessness, with the blurring
of the boundaries between work and leisure time resulting
in the colonization of every last bit of personal freedom
by work and the nagging feeling that each minute must
be devoted to something productive. The purported new
freedom is to a large extent the result of corporate
flexibility strategies, to which the individuals on
the labor market are forced to submit.

Apart from these analyses of the actual economic situation,
a body of literature has also emerged that takes a critical
stance to the sociopolitical consequences of the new
work landscape. These studies prophesy negative consequences
for society and sociability resulting from the constant
pressure caused by people's sense of insecurity and
compulsion to always be on the lookout for new ways
to turn their talents into cash.

In *The Corrosion of Character* (1998) Richard Sennett
tells a sad tale of decline: the end of regular employment
undermines values such as trust and community spirit.
Work is no longer a source of identity; instead, people
shift their search for a feeling of belonging onto local
or national communities. Sennett sees nationalism as
becoming an increasingly widespread reaction to economic
insecurity.

Sergio Bologna also traces the growing local patriotism
of the Lega Nord to the renaissance of the small businessman,
the prevalence of which has replaced the former factories
in North Italy in the aftermath of the labor battles
of the 1970s. Now that the new self-employed no longer
have an official boss to fight against, the social and
tax state becomes their nemesis (summary in *Kurswechsel*
2 / 2000).

Brian Holmes takes a different route to a similar conclusion,
by contrasting Deleuze's "society of control"
with Adorno / Horkheimer's analyses of the "authoritarian
character." From this juxtaposition he derives
a theory of the "flexible character," which
in the days of post-Fordism has supplanted the typical
Fordian authoritarian character (article posted on the
*nettime* mailing list on January 5, 2002). This new
character type is not alienated from his desires like
the authoritarian personality, but rather from political
society, a new form of social control. Paolo Virno has
also examined this susceptibility to cynicism from a
political point of view.

In *Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme* (2003) Luc Boltanski
and Eve Chiapello mull through a huge quantity of management
literature from the 1990s. There they find a remarkable
number of echoes of the 1960s promise of freedom. The
demands for autonomy, creativity and self-determination
that the "artistic" critics belonging to the
1968 generation summoned in their attacks on the economic
establishment reappear here with a pro-capitalist twist,
appearing in the guise of new demands made by the corporation
on its employees and contractors. New potentials and
personality aspects that have long been out of reach
to capitalism (since they had been localized in the
leisure sphere) are now to be tapped and put to work
in the service of economic ends. Exploitation now no
longer takes place through hiring new employees, but
by the ability to dominate networks. Now that the capitalists
have adopted the demand for greater autonomy as their
own, what's still needed, in the opinion of Boltanski
und Chiapello, is a "social" critique to treat
problems of distribution.

Critical Turns

But what can we conclude from all this? While many critics
fault the flexibilization of working conditions, postulating
the responsibility of state and capital for the economic
security of the workforce, Nikolas Rose for one (in
the journal *Kurswechsel* 2 / 2000), posits that the
"entrepreneurial self" is to a great extent
an inexorable contemporary trend. Rose believes that
there is no way to turn back the clock, and that this
new model must henceforward form the point of departure
for all conceivable future political directions. With
this diagnosis in mind, further analytical attempts
were made to give the new situation a critical turn.

A modest venture in this direction is undertaken by Richard
Florida, who turns the "rise of the creative class"
with its need for freedom into a plea for sociopolitical
liberalism in urban politics (*The Rise of the Creative
Class*, 2002). The "creative ethic" requires
an atmosphere of tolerance, cultural diversity and plentiful
events. A permissive social policy and a certain amount
of social security are therefore necessary to foster
the settlement and continued well-being of this "creative
class," which increasingly represents the main
source of economic prosperity in Florida's estimation.

Whereas the needs of creative freelancers become an argument
for social liberalism in the eyes of Florida, other
authors go so far as to place their bets on Communism.
Maurizio Lazzarato sees in "immaterial work"
the main source of added value in a time when the production
of meaning (via advertising, design and communication)
is beginning to predominate over the production of material
goods (*Umherschweifende Produzenten*, 1997). Those
involved in this immaterial sort of production, whose
work consists of molding society's opinions, moods and
attitudes toward life, are also necessarily involved
in shaping political opinion. The boundaries between
the economic and the political blur. Creativity becomes
an attribute of the masses, leading to special challenges
and problems involved in turning creativity into a good
for mass consumption. The difficulty entailed by the
"New Economy," namely that of putting a price
on creativity and enforcing that price, becomes epidemic,
transforming social conditions and calling for at least
a general basic assured income.

Antonio Negri takes up this idea in his works written
in collaboration with Michael Hardt. Immaterial work
with its immanent properties - autonomy, creativity
and self-organization in groups – is at root a realization
of communist forms of socialization, which only appear
on the surface to be under the command of capitalism.
Although capitalism has succeeded in penetrating through
to all areas of life, this was only accomplished at
the price of assimilating into the very heart of its
functioning the resistant, creative abilities of the
"multitude," thereby empowering them to cast
off their capitalist cloak.

The capitalist promise of new opportunities for self-fulfillment
through new forms of work is not only taken at its word
here, but also taken to its logical extreme, radicalized
and turned against the conditions themselves.

In the year 2000, as the New Economy was reaching its
peak and the capitalist push for globalization was encountering
growing resistance from the masses, as manifest by demonstrations
and protests at meetings of the elite, *Empire* came
on the stage to provide a coherent context for a whole
host of developments, combining these with a critical
perspective: globalization of the economy and of elite
politics, New Economy and new working conditions, migration
and resistance, etc.

The fact that *Empire* provoked a furor primarily in
the creative segments of the New Economy proletariat
also has something to do of course with the way in which
the book does not localize hopes for a revolution in
some far-off realm as in other analyses (such as among
industrial workers, in the global South, etc.), but
instead lays the responsibility squarely at the feet
of the readers themselves. *Empire's* critics denounced
this tactic as cajolery among elites (cf. MALMOE 11),
while it was greeted enthusiastically everywhere by
representatives of the creative class. These latter
learned something important about themselves as they
were conferred the status of the very embodiment of
contemporaneity – not like the coolness- and shopping-obsessed
avant-garde splashed across the pages of lifestyle magazines,
but as active players in the process of social emancipation.

The aftermath of September 11, 2001 quickly took the
wind out of the sails of the euphoria with which the
book had initially been received, mainly as a result
of two external developments. For one thing, the plausibility
of a world political theory based on "Empire"
faded quickly in the face of the abrupt about-turn of
US foreign policy and intensifying competition among
the major world players.

And then there was the precipitous burst of the New Economy
bubble. Stock market nosedives and the general economic
decline buried the hopes of sustained rapid expansion
in the core fields of immaterial work and destroyed
for the time being any prospects of a transformation
of social conditions through new business modes.

Depression and Avowal

The long-lasting phase of prosperity in the "Roaring
Nineties" (the title of two economic retrospectives
on the decade, by Joseph Sitglitz and Alan Krueger /
Robert Solow) was supplanted at the end of the decade
by a similarly persistent crisis period. It's no coincidence
that at the beginning of the new millennium the pertinent
literature is increasingly dominated by reports from
the field in which any hope of transfiguration of social
conditions gives way to an attitude slipping rapidly
from cynicism to depression.

In *Les intellos précaires* (2001) Anne and Marine Rambach
depict a generation that can no longer count on a traditional,
stable career after graduating from university, but
instead can look forward only to a future of pseudo
self-employment – in journalism, in the cultural realm,
in film and television, in research or in other creative
fields. Their lives are characterized by an ever-widening
gap between their erstwhile high social standing and
their miserable living standards. After a time, all
the neoliberal promises in the world appear capable
of doing little against the hard, cold facts of everyday
life. In interviews with those affected, the authors
hear stories of depression, fear of the future and of
failure, and feelings of humiliation as the constant
companions with which these people share their daily
lives.

The attention focused on a situation that had often been
swept under the carpet in France before the appearance
of this book was further reinforced by the most recent
strike conducted by the "intermittents," the
freelance cultural workers, who were facing cutbacks
in unemployment assistance. The subsequent debate concerning
the spread of pseudo self-employment and the precarious
working conditions pervading the entire economy, especially
in creative fields, brought forth a wave of autobiographical,
confessional literature – books like Daniel Martinez'
*Carnets d'un intérimaire* (2003), which tells of the
daily humiliations undergone by trainees, and Abdel
Mabrouki's *Génération précaire* (2003).

In their satirical but affectionate parodies of self-encounter
workshops, presented in the art context, Annette Weisser
and Ingo Vetter gathered together representatives of
the new self-employed to talk about their experiences
and sound out new ways to take concerted action against
unacceptable working conditions. The results, documented
in a video and catalog (*NameGame*, 2003), reveal deep
reflection, the universality of the problems encountered
and a number of practical obstacles to forming political
lobbies (lack of time, conflicts of interest, etc.).

In Graz, Vetter and Weisser met up with sociologist Elisabeth
Katschnig-Fasch, who had just published the results
of a research project that took a Bourdieu-like approach
to examining the everyday suffering attributable to
the flexibilized labor market (*Das ganz alltägliche
Elend*, 2003). In an interview with Vetter / Weisser,
Katschnig-Fasch says she was surprised to encounter
very little difficulty in getting people to talk about
their misery - despite the fact that disclosing this
"dirty little secret" is one of today's biggest
taboos. On the contrary, many were grateful to finally
be able to get their concerns off their chest. The research
group came to the conclusion that those living and working
in these precarious times suffer from a loss of meaning
and orientation in their lives and from a lack of recognition
for their work, often reacting with feelings of guilt.
A conspicuous gender-specific component to these problems
was also brought to light.

In his book *Minusvisionen*, an anthology of interviews
with the founders of failed start-ups, Ingo Niermann
(2003) portrays the New Economy as a kind of dream-absorbing
machine. The young entrepreneurs who tell their stories
in Niermann's book, survivors of shipwrecked galleries,
fast-food chains, fashion labels and online platforms,
are presented largely as players who tried to take make
the most for themselves out of the opportunities offered
by the abundant venture capital lining the streets of
the New Economy. They are viewed as businesspeople who
never really took the business aspect seriously, or
who were not up to dealing with it when it reared its
ugly head.

*Minusvisionen* is the German variant of a mode of literature
that has been booming in the USA in recent years – eyewitness
accounts of people who got buried under the rubble of
the dot.com boom. In *Netslaves 2.0* (2003) for example,
Bill Lessard and Co. produced a follow-up to an extremely
successful Internet and book project, which early on
provided a platform for the articulation of widespread
disgruntlement about the working conditions in companies
participating in the Internet gold rush. The stories
in the book make it only too obvious that, even in the
dazzlingly profitable flagship sector of the New Economy
- the Internet industry - behind-the-scenes working
conditions are anything but glamorous.

In his discussion of Geert Lovink's look at the Net culture
of the 1990s following the end of the dot.com boom (*Dark
Fiber*, 2002), "Bifo" Franco Berardi, a theoretician
from the Negri school of postoperational theory, tells
of a class war between cognitive entrepreneurs and the
great monopolies, which has now ended with a colonization
of the Internet by the latter (cf. MALMOE 8). The dreams
of the New Economy have run aground, the model of the
completely free market has been shown to be nothing
but a lie, in both practical and theoretical terms.
Those among the new self-employed who have not yet been
sucked up into the military-industrial complex are now
out of work and disillusioned. Bifo therefore sees the
proper conditions existing on the cultural level for
inculcating a new social consciousness in the present-day
"cognitariat." Now that all neoliberal illusions
have been destroyed, the path has been cleared for a
non-commercial process of autonomous self-organization
of cognitive work, and the establishment of institutions
that are independent of capital. Depression as point
of departure for a new, emancipatory beginning? At the
moment, there is little ground for such an optimistic
outlook. But the ongoing crisis has at least served
to anchor a more sustainable sense of realism in the
minds of those affected.

One sign of this reality-check is the fact that in the
central organ of Austrian "people's capitalism"
of all places, the monthly magazine *Gewinn*, a title
story appeared in the first issue of 2004 on "Making
money without being employed." *Gewinn* writes
that the phenomenon of atypical working conditions "has
by now made its way through all occupational groups,"
with "hundreds of thousands of workers now affected."
But what follows is far from being yet another drum-beating
advertisement for the new self-employment. Instead,
the article traces the phenomenon of outsourcing to
businesses' need to cut costs during the economic slump,
and goes on to complain about complex and inscrutable
labor legislation, pointing out all of the disadvantages
of this working model, and giving a trade union member
the floor to provide her own analysis of the situation
-- all an obvious indication that the days of bloated
euphoria and promises are apparently over, at least
for now. The reality of the present crisis leaves little
room even in the most notorious ideology factories for
trying to put a bright face on things.